the kingdom: expansive and subversive

He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”

Luke 13:18-19

With two quite average word pictures, Jesus describes how God’s kingdom works in the world. First in Luke 13:18-19 we have a picture of a gardener planting a small mustard seed that becomes a sheltering tree. Secondly there is a picture in Luke 13:20-21 of a woman hiding leaven in flour until it was all leavened for breadmaking. The first picture emphasizes the sheltering expanse of God’s kingdom and the extent to which it grows. It is large and proves a safe place for lives to be lived. The second picture describes the secretive way the kingdom of God subverts the sinful world system until all is changed by the pervasive nature of the kingdom.

I wish today to celebrate both the expansive shelter and the subtle change of God’s kingdom. Christians are scattered all over this world. Churches are light and salt. The gospel is a global phenomenon, reaching people even when persecution is the cost of its proclamation. Resisting the gospel seems to just propel the message forward. The mustard seed gospel spans the globe and believers are thriving in the shelter of the branches of the kingdom as the Word of God sustains, and the Spirit of God leads.

That kingdom change is happening just one life at a time as the yeast slowly works its way through the flour, leavening this world with the righteousness of Christ. This is the way God is growing His kingdom, not with takeovers or military displays, but with singular life change occurring on a significant global scale. The gospel of the kingdom is being preached the world over. And this is why Christians continue to bring the gospel message, making disciples one by one, to as many individuals as we can. This is the task of the church. It is how God’s kingdom expands and subverts.

I am too stressed to feel blessed.

Then I said, “I will appeal to this,

to the years of the right hand of the Most High.”

Psalm 77:10

This is a deliberate move to willfully choose to appeal to the work of God despite a season of doubt and pain. I love that the psalms do this so much, and Psalm 77 is a favorite because it perfectly captures what to do when my soul hits a troubling season where it seems I can’t see God at work. It encourages me to remember what God has done.

This appeal to “the years of the right hand of the Most High” in verse 10 comes right after the psalmist has endured a sleepless night filled with troubling questions. Five painful questions that haunt the soul are fired at God in Psalm 77:7-9. They describe feelings more than facts, but they are painful nonetheless. The psalmist feels like God will never favor His people again. He feels like God’s love has ceased. He feels like God has no more promises to bless. It feels like grace is gone and anger from God is all that is left.

Despite this spiritual depression, God moves through the deliberate act of faith that remembers God’s work in the past. God has blessed. And this psalm pushes us to remember God at the times where we feel more stressed than blessed. The psalm goes on to list five words that counteract those previous five questions as it remembers specifically God’s deeds, wonders, works, ways, and might. This ultimately leads to praise for God’s redemptive work, all laid out beautifully in Psalm 77:11-15. And this is why I discipline myself to write in a journal. It is the way that I can appeal to God’s work when I feel seasons of doubt. The value of journaling comes in the recording of God’s work, but most importantly, in the remembering of His work that comes in my reading of them. Stressful, difficult, doubting seasons all begin to fade when compared to what I know God has done for me in the past, and right now, still is doing for my future.

weakest man alive

His father and mother did not know that it was from the Lord, for he was seeking an opportunity against the Philistines. At that time the Philistines ruled over Israel.

Judges 14:4

The story of Samson is a story of the sovereignty of God over sinful human choices. It is about God’s strength and man’s failing weakness. Samson has little regard for the Law or for his Nazirite vows. This is seen from very beginning of his story when he insists on arranging a marriage to a gentile woman in violation of God’s Law. His parents have tried so hard to raise Samson to be devout, but he already as a young man will have none of it. He wants a Philistine woman. And God will use even this wrong in Samson to deliver the nation.

Later in this same chapter Samson violates his vows by touching the dead body of a lion in order to scrape honey from the carcass. He kills 1000 Philistines with the jawbone of a dead donkey. He is selfish and careless with the covenant. In Samson’s world it was all about what he wanted, and his emotions ran unchecked.

He would go on disobeying God with relationships with Philistine women. He would eventually break every one of his vows until God finally allowed his humiliating capture by enraged and afraid Philistine oppressors. By that time Samson had racked up an impressive body count of dead Philistines in his wake. Yet Samson would die an angry, blind sacrifice, dying not for the nation, but with a desire for his own vengeance driving him, as clear an example as how not to live as anyone could ever be. His story is not heroic. It is tragic. Samson is not any kind of hero. God is the deliverer in the Samson story. God shows Himself strong as His Spirit does the work in a very pathetic weak man.

believing Jesus and seeing the Father

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

Luke 10:22

You can only know God through Jesus Christ. And that is why all Christian worship and experience must center upon Jesus. It is Jesus that reveals the Father. There is no other way to know God. Jesus reveals Him.

Just as God the Father sent His Son into the world to save us, so Jesus reveals the Father and His love to us. We cannot know that apart from Jesus. So for me to be content and clear in my knowledge of God, I must not ever stray from following Jesus. And that means the gospel has to be at my center.

Because Jesus came, by the love of the Father, to die for sinners and to be raised so that we might know life, I can be forgiven and can truly be found in Him so that the Father accepts me through the work of the Son. To know God, I must know Jesus. To know Jesus I must believe the gospel.

Lord Jesus,

I thank You for showing me the Father. I worship You for Your obedience to the Father’s will. You arrived on earth with one mission: to end sin’s hold on us by dying once for all and to be raised from the dead so we might believe and have eternal life. You are my only hope, and Jesus, I believe You. I trust only the gospel and I find my life and my hope in You!

Amen

this old man’s prayer

O God, from my youth you have taught me,

and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.

So even to old age and gray hairs,

O God, do not forsake me,

until I proclaim your might to another generation,

your power to all those to come.

Psalm 71:17-18

This prayer feels like a faint echo of my own life. I still vividly remember the time when Jesus changed my life. I was only 7 years old, yet the change was amazing. My parents became Christians, responding to the gospel in a revival service altar call (really old fashioned... really Baptist), both in the same night. Our home was transformed by grace and the gospel. I understood the gospel myself just a few months later in a Vacation Bible School (also very Baptist). That was 1971. From my youth then, God has taught me. And I have desired to proclaim His wondrous deeds.

And now I am near the double nickel mark, that magical age where societal pressures push people to think hard about retirement and self-driven fantasies of a life of ease in old age (I’m not ready for that at all). I am more and more an “old guy” when I go to pastor’s gatherings and conferences. It’s OK. I am fine with this stage. It has its advantages. When I turned 50, I had a firm conviction (some would call it a “word from the Lord” but I wouldn’t go that far) that my ministry efforts needed to transition to a concentration on helping the “young eagles” fly. I’ve seen too many old pastors not train young leaders to take their place and watched churches crash as a result. I think that is so selfish. No way is any ministry ever to be dependent upon me.

And here I am... graying whiskers and stiff knees, sorting meds in the morning, knowing God wants me to still proclaim His might to another generation. Aging has taught me that God is the constant source of strength, to the young and to the old. The same God that transformed my world in my youth is powerfully transforming this old dude still! May God do so in order that His power might be known to those yet to come! Amen. 

people God uses

And Deborah said to Barak, “Up! For this is the day in which the Lord has given Sisera into your hand. Does not the Lord go out before you?” So Barak went down from Mount Tabor with 10,000 men following him.

Judges 4:14

God uses the most interesting and the most average of people to do His great work. He will accomplish His means using the men and women who will simply make themselves available to Him. In this chapter there are three people God uses to save Israel from the Canaanite oppressions committed by Sisera and his army.

God had already raised Deborah as a prophetic judge for Israel. And when the time was right, she summoned Barak, a military commander, to encourage him to gather his troops and defeat the oppressors. But Barak would not act without Deborah’s prophetic ministry alongside him. And so the unlikely team of prophetess and general together lead Israel into battle. There is a plan in action. God is giving them strength. I can hear the “A-Team” theme song playing as the action starts!

But Sisera escapes the battle, appearing to successfully elude capture. God is in control, though! He raises up a third deliverer... a very unassuming nomad woman named Jael, who under the guise of hospitality, slips Sisera a mickey, and when the Canaanite general snores away in her tent, Jael drives a tent peg through his temple with a worker’s mallet. She must have been one strong woman! God uses whom He will and justice is done as Israel is saved. Salvation is accomplished. God delights in writing His story using regular lives!

the friend of cheats and sinners

The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’

Luke 7:34

I wonder what we would accuse Jesus of today? He lives in His people, yet for the most part, the church seems to hardly bear His same reputation as Jesus described Himself in this passage. We gather together quite properly, with good intentions, but do we also go out into our lives to live among sinners as comfortably and as winsomely as Jesus has shown us by His life recorded in the gospels? Are we more known for our judgmental actions, our alliances with political causes, our quest for cultural power, then for our day to day lives among people who don’t know Jesus? We

Why aren’t we known for our acceptance, for are closeness to sinners so that they call us friends?

I have come to the conclusion that religion has destroyed the gospel witness of many a disciple of Jesus. And perhaps the best thing we can be to those who aren’t followers of Jesus is a friend and not in a “double agent” undercover sense of the word. We don’t foist our moral agendas on those who don’t know Jesus. Instead, we bring Jesus to their places and let the light of the gospel lovingly shine so that they may see Him, hear us speak of Him, crave the gospel they see in us, so that they may repent of sin, turn to their Savior, follow Him and call more sinners to repentance in that work. Jesus does all the changing. We are just there, naturally, with them as friends... true friends who enjoy the fun and compradarie of being together. But for Jesus to make that change, we must first be with them.

Christians must not isolate. And finding the right word to describe what we do is important. “Infiltrate” is not the right word. Jesus has the right word for us: “friend”. Christians, with Jesus leading them, must relate as friends with those who do not know Jesus. We must live our lives in the world, not away from it. We do not gather in worship on Sunday to stay cloistered. We gather to be strengthened as we scatter naturally into great friendships with others. We must love those who need Jesus, risking our souls in friendship, opening up and caring and being cared for by them. We need not fear and we must not judge. We must be friends with people, repenting with tears of our pretentious self-made, works-based religion. We must be like Jesus.